Animal Husbandry (3 page)

Loser
.

So I hurried.

Fifteen minutes later, when I found Ray at the bar, he took my arm.

“You should have seen it,” he said, looking around, hoping it was still there. “There were these two things, standing
straight out, like this,” he said, holding a few strands of his own hair out by the ends. Then he made the silent-scream face with his mouth and his eyes opened wide behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “It was like—roach antennae.”

It was dark and humid and almost quiet when we stood under the parking sign, under the light, trying to think of what to do next.

“We could have a nightcap,” I think I said, thinking it was forward enough to show that I was interested but not so forward as to scare the shit out of him, thinking it was the kind of thing two coworkers did at three in the morning after everyone else had gone home.

Ray looked at me and smiled shyly. “I was hoping this would happen,” he whispered.

Then he looked away, and I looked away, and we both started walking west.

That’s how it started.

With a phone call.

With a nightcap.

With a hair imitation.

With
shyness
.

That’s how it always starts.

(Let me just interrupt myself for a minute to dispel a myth—that men are shy.

Men are not shy
.

They may
seem
shy, they may even act shy, at the beginning, with all their Uriah Heep hand-wringing and obsequious seeping, but they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, shy.

Trust me. You’ll see.)

Ray and I actually started shortly after we met at work.

I was booking talent for
The Diane Roberts Show
, a serious late-night David-Susskind-esque talk show taped in New York. When the show was picked up nationally by public television that January, the station moved Diane and her assistant Evelyn over first, along with Diane’s treadmill. But when the exercise equipment didn’t fit in her office, Diane insisted that her space be reconfigured so that there was ample room in her three-windowed office for herself, the treadmill, her rack of wool blazers and turtlenecks, and her cases of personal-size bottles of Volvic water, which she kept unrefrigerated—and, of course, Evelyn, whose cubicle just outside Diane’s office was reduced by half in the process. A few weeks later they moved the rest of us out of our shabby, cramped offices on 57th Street and Ninth Avenue into the slightly less cramped but still shabby studios on 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

“Isn’t this
fab
ulous?” Diane gushed the first morning we were all together again, camped out on the floor of her office because the greenroom hadn’t been painted green yet. Diane’s hair had just been triple-processed to “Diane Sawyer blond,” as she called it, and she still had her post-Christmas St. Bart’s glow. She touched a few of us on the head as she shimmied excitedly across the floor on her way back to her desk chair.

“Now. Before we get started on this month’s schedule, I want to introduce our new executive producer, Ray Brown.” Diane looked expectantly around the office. “Ray?” She fondled
the rim of her Volvic bottle and swiveled around in her chair. “Evelyn, where’s Ray?”

Evelyn poked her blond head out from under the rack of blazers. “He’s in the studio.”

“Oh,” Diane said. She swiveled again and touched the intercom button that connected her to the studio’s control room and spoke into the speaker unit. “Ray,” she said with Helen Gurley Brown flirtatiousness. “We’re meeting now.” She kept her finger on the button and smiled until she heard his voice through the static.

“Yes. I know,” the voice said. “But unfortunately I’m tied up in about fourteen feet of videotape that just exploded out of its cassette.”

Diane laughed. “Okay. Then say hello to everyone I’ve just introduced you to.”

There was a pause.

“Hello,” the voice said.

“Good-bye,” said Diane.

And that was the first I heard of the man who would, months later, ruin my life.

After exploring our new space, I liked the fact that there were actual offices instead of cubicles and that there were windows—that opened. And the fact that half of the twenty-five people who worked there were men—and straight—and that all of them were good-looking wasn’t too hard to take either.

Can you tell it had been a while since I’d been out on a date?

“No way,” Joan had said enviously when I called to tell her about my first day. Joan and I had known each other since we were both assistants at
People
magazine sitting out in the same
hallway, and we had never quite gotten over the thrill of having been promoted to windowed offices. Now she was an editor at
Men’s Times
magazine and I was chasing down celebrities, and though neither of us had time to go to the bathroom once we got to the office, we still managed to talk to each other on the phone at least eleven times a day.

“It’s true,” I said, eyeing the painted mullions and pretending to enjoy a cold, damp breeze. “They open and everything.”

Joan typed loudly into the phone. I imagined her thick dark hair exploding out of its ponytail the way it always did when it was rainy and humid. “I wasn’t talking about the
windows
,” she said, annoyed. “I was talking about the
view
.”

Ray’s office was down the hall and around the corner from mine, on the other side of the floor, next to Diane’s office, and far enough away for me not to have much to do with him. As with most talk shows, people at my level reported to the executive producer. Diane, though, preferred that I report to her first and directly, so Ray and I had little direct contact on a day-to-day basis. All I knew about him then was that he was the new executive producer that PBS had assigned to us and that he drank a lot of coffee—information I had deduced from his ever-present clipboard and the thin fiber-optic microphones he wore around his neck like miniature stethoscopes, and from the number of times he passed by my office to and from the men’s room (six times, on the average, before noon alone). That, and the fact that he had dark-brown hair, dark-brown eyes, and a soccer player’s physique (my favorite combination of features) and an ass even a straight man would want to take a bite out of.

At the end of the first week he came into my office for the first time and handed me a memo.

“You don’t have to read it,” he said. “I write them so I won’t get fired.”

I took my glasses off and checked his face. His mouth moved into a wry smile, and when it did, one eyebrow went up, and I could see his teeth—big, straight, bright-white teeth that momentarily fascinated me.

“I’m kidding. I wish I
would
get fired.” He extended his hand and we shook. “I’m Ray Brown.”

“I’m Jane Goodall.”

“I know,” he said. He looked around my office nervously and paced, stopping only to look at the two photographs tacked onto my bulletin board.

“Boyfriend?” he asked, pointing at the picture of David and me, taken the year before at a PBS fund-raiser when David still looked straight enough to trick people into thinking that he and I were dating.

“No,” I said. “That’s David. Just a friend.”

“Just a friend,” he repeated absently. Then he pointed at a strip of black-and-white pictures of Joan and me that we’d taken in a photo booth in the East Village. We went there together every year, on each of our birthdays, and this was the most recent strip, taken in late December, right after Joan had finally turned thirty too.

“Girlfriend? Significant other?”

I laughed and shook my head. “Practically. That’s Joan. My best friend.”

“You guys look alike,” he said, still staring at the picture.

“I know. That’s what happens when you spend too much time together.”

Ray moved away from the bulletin board and back toward my desk. “So, that’s a great name you have. People must comment on it a lot, I bet.”

I nodded. “They always ask me if I’m into chimps.”

He smiled. “And? Are you?”

“Not particularly. With the possible exception of Curious George when I was four.”

“But Curious George was a monkey, not a chimp.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Big difference. You ought to know that with a name like yours. And since you don’t, we should get the real Jane Goodall on the show. Fly her in from Tanzania or wherever the fuck she lives and educate you about your kin.”

I laughed and then didn’t say anything for a moment or two until I realized that he was still waiting for me to read his memo.

Due to the fact that Diane dislikes being touched by guests during the broadcast, please be advised that during all interviews guests will now be seated sixteen inches to Diane’s left
(
i.e., out of arm’s reach
).

I put it down and looked at my arm. “Sixteen inches?” I said, making little inch measurements with my fingers. Then I looked at Ray. “Who touched her?”

“All the guests touch her. They like to take her hand while they’re talking, or touch her on the arm. It makes them feel intimate, like they’re close friends. Now that she thinks she’s famous, she has this thing about everybody wanting something from her. It pisses her off.”

“But I thought she liked that touchy stuff,” I said. Since the show had gone national, Diane had gotten more relaxed, more casual, as if the show were being taped in the back booth of a bar at closing time. She’d even taken to wearing little black turtlenecks under her jackets, making her look like a short,
perky, girlishly fifty David Susskind—or David Birney. “In fact,” I said, “she’s the one who always touches first.”

“That’s different,” Ray said. “She’s the host. It’s her show.”

Something wasn’t adding up. I stared at Ray. “Who touched her?”

He hesitated, then smirked. “That guy from the World Bank. Two weeks ago. And it wasn’t just her arm he was touching.”

I laughed. I hadn’t seen the show myself because of Diane’s obsession with Kevin Costner. She had dispatched me that night to ambush him in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel while he was in town promoting his new movie and to beg him to come on the show. (“Give him a mug,” she’d said, handing me a new one from the shelf behind her desk—a black glossy cup with
THE DIANE ROBERTS SHOW
in serious type on one side and a color headshot of herself on the other—“and tell him how much I loved
Wyatt Earp
.”) But the next morning Carla, the associate producer, said that the World Bank segment looked like a grope fest.

“So sixteen inches is going to make a difference?”

“We measured,” Ray said. “Some people’s arms are longer than that, of course, but Diane seems to think that’s the minimum distance to prevent unconscious touching. She thinks anything less than that makes it too easy.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think it’s ridiculous. I came from news. Two years with MacNeil/Lehrer. There was none of this handling-the-talent bullshit, no Macy’s-Thanksgiving-Day-Parade-float-size egos. No chicken-neck-disguising black turtlenecks. No weighing themselves before tapings. Those guys sat there, read their stories, got up, and went home. The most I ever did was lend Jim
a tie when he got it caught in his typewriter an hour before airtime. And I had to force it on him.”

He walked over to the window and stood in front of the glass. Dusk had just started to fall, and I could see the sky turning pink behind the reflection of his face.

“Nice view,” he said, tilting his head slightly and fixing his hair using the window’s reflection. Then he checked his watch. “See you in the studio.”

For sure.

Ray and I talked a few times after that in the following weeks, in the elevator, at the Xerox machine, in front of the building one Friday evening after a bright winter day that felt like spring. Once, in early March, we even went around the corner to the Carnegie Deli for lunch, and on the way there Ray helped an old woman across the street. I remember how impressed I was by his kindness when he stooped slightly and linked her arm through his.

“Please don’t tell me you don’t eat meat,” Ray said when we sat down. He took his jacket off and pushed his menu away without looking at it.

I took my jacket off too and opened my menu. “I eat meat. Sometimes.”

“Oh, Jesus. Thank God,” he said. “I’m so tired of being looked at like an animal whenever I order something other than cheese.” He signaled the waiter. “That’s what happens when you’re involved with a vegetarian. Sometimes I worry that she’s going to follow me into a place like this and spray me with a can of red paint, like those wackos do to women wearing fur.”